“It’s a system that lies automatically, at every level from bottom to top – from sergeant to commander in chief – to conceal murder.” Daniel Ellsburg, Secrets, (Viking, 2002)

“Beneath all the fakes and lies and all the mental aberrations, however deeply hidden or wildly deformed, the truth still breaks through, still glitters, still breathes.” (Mihail Sebastian, Romanian playwright, as quoted by Nickolson Baker, Human Smoke, Simon & Schuster, 2008)

In the movie, Fair Game, about the travails of Valerie Plame, and her outing as a CIA agent by the Bush administration, Sean Penn, in the character of Joe Wilson, Plame’s husband, exhorts a group of students to “Demand the Truth!” Yet, very few of us have demanded to know the truth about 9/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center. We have been content with the officially sanctioned explanation. Those who are not so content are ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists.”

It was a conspiracy – 9/11. That is indisputable. There is no “lone gunman” to confuse matters. To say anything meaningful about 9/11, you have to be a conspiracy theorist. It is only a question of whose theory of the conspiracy you are prepared to believe. It is incredible that anyone still believes anything the Bush administration said about that tragic day.

Statement by Colleen Kelley, a founding member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows was formed around the core issue of civilian casualties: We did then and we do not now condone the killing of civilians in other lands. Our organization was founded to oppose any action that would necessitate the deaths of civilians. Worse, still, is the denial of any value of these Iraqi lives, through the concealment of their very existence.

For 9/11 families, the rough number 2,996 was rounded up to 3000 through addition. For the Iraqi people, their numbers were alluded to as a subtraction vastly different from any attempt at reality.

As people who are well aware of the suffering, we say stop killing civilians now and take responsibility for those whose lives are already lost.

This is a nice gesture 7 years after the fact that American and British (NATO) forces led the invasion into Iraq in 2003; of which we still have over 80,000 American troops deployed to , plus the 100,000 American troops deployed in Afghanistan.

And just like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Manninghan-Buller was confident that this war would be long, so long that she was not sure that it could be won, saying, “ifthis is a warthat canbe won,it is not going to be won soon.”

“But the world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives..”

Manninghan-Buller resigned after the London 7/7/05 bombings due to the obviously inept, and quite possibly criminal, intelligence failures. This is from a Daily Mail article in 2006:

The head of MI5 has resigned weeks before full details of the role of her agents in a surveillance operation involving two of the July 7 bombers are due to be revealed.

Wait a minute……What happened to only 100 Al Qaeda members in the region? Was the 50-100 years of war prediction by John McCain on the Presidential campaign trail accurate? Stop paying your taxes yesterday people!

The United States may still be in the Afghanistan and Iraq region for another ten years, according to Gen. George Casey.

“The types of conflict that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think are likely to be fighting here for a decade or so, are focused on the people,” Casey, the army’s Chief of Staff, said Friday night at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.

“We are not going to succeed in either place by military means alone. You are only going to succeed when the people perceive there is a government represented by their interests, when there is an economy that can give them a job to support their families, when there are educational systems that can educate their family. All those things are essential to the long term success of the military operation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist hailed as a hero in the Arab world for throwing his shoes at the then President Bush, claims, “Under US pressure, Iraqi media covered up my torture and supporters were arrested.”

Pentagon officials announced today that for the first time since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there are more troops in Afghanistan than Iraq, officially making Afghanistan the ‘Big War’ and Iraq ‘that other war.’

Given President Obama’s campaign pledges to escalate the war in Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq, it is a wonder that it took over 16 months to reach this point, but a snail’s pace in the Iraq drawdown coupled with logistics problems in the latest Afghanistan escalation conspired to make it a long, difficult road.

An average of 18 US military veterans are taking their lives every day as the Obama administration and the Pentagon grow increasingly defensive about the epidemic of suicides driven by Washington’s wars of aggression.

The stunning figure was reported last week by the Army Times, citing officials in the US Veterans Affairs Department.

The department estimates that there are 950 suicide attempts every month by veterans who are receiving treatment from the department. Of these, 7 percent succeed in taking their own lives, while 11 percent try to kill themselves again within nine months.